How An Unhealthy Obsession With “Privilege” Leads To Our Dehumanization
How An Unhealthy Obsession With “Privilege” Leads To Our Dehumanization
Last year, I came across a tweet sharing an image for thousands to view and discuss online that still remains, to this day, as scarily relevant.
It was a Home Depot worksheet created with the goal to determine exactly what “privilege” is. Along with the tweet came a barrage of mixed feelings about such a worksheet’s efficacy, its meaning, and whether or not such a worksheet could or would do any good.
In fact, many proponents of the broader strokes of DEI admitted they could easily be privileged by such a worksheet, and the exercise intended no harm. As anyone could predict, those who were able to identify themselves as “white” “male” or “heterosexual” were the most flagrant in their disdain for such a worksheet. No matter how you fair on the categories themselves — in this author’s opinion, this worksheet, and others like it, are not only clunky in their design, but they are wildly inaccurate in their attempts to categorize and “unpack” privilege.
Firstly, bear in mind that there is technically an infinite number of ways to categorize people.
Because we can categorize people by how well they perform a task, and because there are an infinite number of tasks, compounded with immutable characteristics, we can organize people into a potentially infinite number of categories.
We are used to hearing these same categories over and over:
*Race
*Sex
*Sexual orientation
Even at the current moment, the above are the ones making the headlines. However, the three below are right at the peripheries, and often mentioned throughout our discussions on the various human categories:
*Religion
*Class
*Able-Bodied/Disabled
After these categories, things can become tricky, should we maximize our differences further:
*IQ
*Political Leanings
*Geographic Location
*Age
And further:
*Education
*Resourcefulness
*Charm
And finally, we can drift into silliness, if we should like:
*Sense of humor
*Attractiveness
*Height
*Weight
*Running of the 100M dash
*Time it takes to solve a Rubik's cube
If you notice, we do use all of the categories on a day-to-day basis. We use some of them when hiring someone for a job and some we use when looking for a mate. What is very often so misunderstood is that these categories are infinite and accumulative — they all add up, with differing contributions to make up a person.
Worksheets like the one provided by Home Depot are force-feeding their employees (at the behest of loud, fringe bureaucrats) the same privilege pyramid that lacks any of the nuances of our daily lives. How does one measure charm? How about coming from a two-parent home? How do we gauge the love of a grandmother, versus a child whose grandmother died before they were born?
What about those who are great at mathematics?
Those who were born with a mother or father who was a whiz at power tools? Certainly, this could help in looking for employment at a home improvement warehouse.
How about attraction privilege?
Or the privilege of being extraordinarily talented?
There is a large, growing population of people who are becoming ever-tired of checking off an ever-growing number of boxes, that pit them against their co-workers, their friends, and in some cases, their very own family members.
I have thought a lot about this, as well as the narrative of “white supremacy”, and “white privilege”, and rarely is it mentioned that the force behind such privilege or supremacy could simply be due to a dominating number in the population. But then again, why indulge in one type of privilege, when intersectionality describes us as constellations of advantageous and disadvantageous attributes? If these constellations are accumulations of categories, how do we stack them? How do we compare them?
How do we stack the never-ending?
How do we compare the infinite?
In pop culture today, we stretch out every moment we possibly can to honor, recognize, and show representation for any group that has a gripe against the majority. So intense is this habit, that a “gay, cisgender, white, male” will often identify as gay first, putting their more easily victimized status upfront in the categorical list of identity traits. But one cannot simply proceed with such a person, without, too, admitting they were also cisgender, white, AND male! Where do you really fit in the dominance hierarchy?
Without a doubt, we have seen an exponential uptick in holidays, memorials, awareness weeks, and parades to help celebrate and normalize our friends in those historically not-so-often celebrated categories. But can the pop-culture activism that is defining our current moment chew gum and walk at the same time?
Perhaps we have perfected the binary — where to celebrate one group is to put down its polar opposite. Whereas to put up in shiny and colorful letters the chants of one group is to silence the opposing group — an “opposition” which may or may not be there, but nevertheless, lives in our minds rent-free.
To speak in the most basic terms, there’s a shrieking coldness, a dehumanizing of us all (whatever your categorical constellation demands you be) because we all know we are infinitely more complicated than what could be laid out in a worksheet from the Home Depot’s HR department. These initiatives are clunky, sloppy, and useless. They divide and fractionalize people into split-off groups, breaking down any sense of human-to-human connection.
And when this fractionalizing comes down to the final logical conclusion, we can say that we have been split and cannot be split any further. That “YOU” are “you and only you” and I am “me and only me” we can call that the state of being an individual.
The bad news is that the “individual” is the smallest minority on the planet. The good news is that is what you have been all along.
JSV
2023
Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author's own.
Good points! Although I am white, and if I were not that would have been a disadvantage at various times in my life, I judge that the greatest advantages that I had in my life were to be born healthy, in the US, to a (single) loving and responsible mom who earned enough to keep a roof over our heads. Those circumstances alone gave me endless opportunities, along with every other kid born in the US in the modern era to families that weren't abusive or crushingly poor.
Beyond that, my privilege was to have a high IQ, a personality that loved learning everything, and then icing on the cake when I got to college and discovered that the ugly duckling had turned into a swan. Being pretty opened a LOT of doors! But I would have found a husband and had a good life and professional career even if I wasn't particularly attractive.
How is privilege" derived? Is it given or taken? Do those with privilege hoist it on themselves? If it isn't legitimate why is it worth acknowledging?